Good health and organic living have always been a part of the Conscious Life Expo. Every year we hunt down the natural beauty product vendors and check out the anti-aging treatments, which are always first on our list.

One of our favorites products is Susana Puelles’ AMALIXIR, which offers concentrated nourishment – or food – for the skin. AMALIXIR is a high-quality skin care product – and you can immediately feel that quality by using just a few tiny drops, which leave your skin super soft and smooth.

Puelles creates with a passion and has a great love of herbs and belief in self-regenerative skin healing. Her products include Camu berry and organic Amazonian herbs. Her skin-care line include oil cleansers, serums and elixirs.

Her background as an acupuncturist and women’s health practitioner, and her own personal search for nontoxic products took her past the ugly side of beauty: the deceptive and unregulated mainstream beauty market with products that take advantage of our weakness, which is vanity, and the endless search for youth via products that are not only detrimental to our wallet but also costly to our health.

Puelles’ talk at the expo, “Transforming Your Beauty Ritual” was packed with vital information that I wanted to share with readers:

Puelles was talking about Botox injections, fillers and other anti-aging products that contain animal products and human byproducts and other toxic and unpronounceable gunk. Her research findings on regular beauty products is scary and disgusting. So if you have a weak stomach stop here.

Seaweed is good because it contains trace minerals, calcium and magnesium. When a product includes collagen, that material often comes from chicken sternum and chicken bone marrow. It’s just like making a broth out of bone marrow and getting the gelatin for nutritional value, but in this case it’s synthesized in a lab, put in a bottle and preserved.

Other products will sell you herbal extracts. There are amazing herbs that can do amazing thing things. But the extraction process to get an extract into a beauty product can be quite toxic. Some commercial methods use hexane, heptane and ethanol. Chemically extracting herbs decreases their vitality. It could be a miracle herb, but if you’re not boiling it at home or eating it, its active ingredient could very likely be gone. If you add wax and a preservative, often that’s all you get.

The beauty industry is not regulated at all, even by the FDA. They can sell you anything and package it as a proprietary formula. If a product contains fragrance, it can say “par fume” or “fragrance,” and that is a major loophole. Such products can contain up 17 chemicals that do not have to be disclosed. You don’t even know what “fragrance” is.

And these so-called fragrances are tricky. They hit the pineal glands with a lot of pheromones that offset the brain’s chemistry. They trigger a satiation that can mimic an addiction. These products have a lot of animal (often pig) pheromones that set off women’s hormones. More than 95 percent of the chemicals in synthetic fragrances are derived from petrochemicals. These petrochemicals include benzene, aldehydes, phthalates, etc.

Puelles cites research by the Environmental Working Group that found more than 75 percent of products listing “fragrance” contained phthalates, which have been show to disrupt hormone activity, reduce sperm counts and cause reproductive malformation, and which have been linked to liver and breast cancer, diabetes and obesity.

It’s the same with anti-aging serums – they are usually made out of animal and human byproducts.

Discarded human and animal placenta is used because hormones such as hyaluronic acid and protein hydrolysate extracted from the placenta help promote tissue growth, which is very effective at ‘erasing’ wrinkles.

Chicken bone marrow is full of glucosamine, which is great to use on skin since it promotes cell growth for a youthful look. It is used in moisturizers and anti-aging creams.

Hospitals sell baby fetal tissue and baby foreskins to the pharmaceutical companies. They used to only sell to dermatologists to make skin grafts for burn victims, because one little foreskin can generate up to four acres of skin.

The pharmaceutical industry has so many marketing techniques and so many illusions. They create these campaigns based on fear of aging. We fear aging and we love cosmetics, they package toxin beautifully, and they are really good at it.

Puelles’ mission is to let people know what’s really in these heavily marketed skin care products.

Luckily there are simple alternatives. Be careful with anything you put on your skin because 60 percent of it goes directly into your bloodstream. If its toxic and preserved, it will stay in your fat tissue, in women it ends up mostly in breast tissue, your thighs and your gut. That’s where women hold more fat because of the hormones.

Treat yourself to one of Puelles’ AMALIXIR products and see what you think.